After 12 months of huge hitters resembling Helldivers 2, Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, Dune: Part 2 and Shogun, it’s not unreasonable to think about 2024 a great yr for popular culture. But the graceful at all times comes with the tough, and the previous yr actually has been a rocky one for the issues we love and the individuals who make them.
From layoffs and studio closures to expensive consoles, underwhelming variations and struggling sequels, these are the largest disappointments in 2024.
Gaming Industry Layoffs and Closures
The video games trade discovered itself going through a disaster in 2023 as many publishers and studios, each giant and small, made scores of employees redundant in an effort to chop prices. But the pains of that yr could be repeated in 2024, which has seen an estimated 14,600 job losses – a 39% enhance year-on-year. The cuts have seen hundreds of proficient studio employees thrown into essentially the most troublesome job market the video games trade has ever seen, with builders looking for new roles in a panorama the place firms are slimming down.
Among the foremost firms reducing employees unfastened have been Riot, Microsoft, Bungie, Unity, TakeTwo Interactive, EA, and PlayStation. Such companies have diminished their employees numbers for quite a lot of causes and components, be that rising growth prices, shifting participant habits within the years following the COVID-19 pandemic, and the worldwide impression of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Whatever the explanations, remaining employees at these publishers and studios should proceed to work in unsure occasions with out the help of their former colleagues.
That is that if their studio nonetheless exists. Adding to the dismal image are a number of studio closures. Perhaps essentially the most outstanding amongst them is Arkane Austin, Bethesda’s immersive sim specialist accountable for the acclaimed Prey. Sadly its most up-to-date launch, Redfall, was a crucial and industrial bomb – a state of affairs that seemingly sealed its destiny. Arkane Austin was shuttered by father or mother firm Microsoft, together with Alpha Dog Games, Roundhouse Games, and Hi-Fi Rush developer Tango Gameworks. Somewhat miraculously, Tango was rescued by Krafton in a last-minute flip of destiny, however such excellent news is uncommon. Also struggling closure this yr was PlayStation’s London Studio, Galvanic Games, Avalanche Studio Group’s New York and Montreal studios, in addition to others. To say it has been a troublesome yr is an understatement.
Trend-chasing Failures
Another developer closed for good is Firewalk Studios, the crew behind what’s actually PlayStation’s greatest catastrophe of the technology: Concord. A PvP hero shooter, its lengthy and expensive growth meant it arrived lengthy after the style had peaked in reputation. But, regardless of being developed by many FPS veterans hailing from the likes of Bungie and Activision, what might have been PlayStation’s subsequent large multiplayer phenomenon struggled to face out from the likes of Overwatch and Apex Legends because of its lacklustre character kits and customary fare goal design. From the skin Concord merely regarded like one other typical hero shooter, which meant few wished to see what was happening inside.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that just about nobody turned up for its August launch – it achieved a excessive of simply 697 concurrent gamers on Steam throughout its first week. Less than two weeks later, Sony pulled Concord from sale, refunded gamers, and shut the sport down. By the top of October, Firewalk Studios was closed for enterprise. It all sadly means Concord is gone with no hint. Well, virtually – an episode of Amazon’s Secret Level animated collection serves as a prequel to the continued Concord in-game story that by no means occurred.
An identical, fortunately much less tragic story additionally occurred earlier this yr with Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League. After months of poorly-received advertising and marketing, Sucide Squad launched as a crucial and industrial bomb. As with Concord, a lot of Kill The Justice League’s failings have been on account of chasing tendencies that gamers have lengthy since largely uninterested in – on this case, the Destiny-style live-service shooter grind. It didn’t assist that Suicide Squad resembled Crystal Dynamics’ ill-fated Avengers sport from a number of years again, which equally irritated gamers for being a repetitive multiplayer PvE sport. In Suicide Squad’s case, it was a shattering fall from grace for a studio that beforehand made beloved single-player Batman video games. Many of us simply wished extra of that best-in-class superhero motion with a villainous twist, however sadly Warner Bros’ chase of live-service income seemingly bought in the way in which. Not that it paid off – an preliminary lack of gross sales and dwindling gamers has contributed to a big income decline for the corporate.
Hardware Hiccups
The time-compressing impact of the pandemic years has disguised the truth that, sure, we’re already on the midpoint of the present console technology. Right on cue, Sony delivered its mid-cycle refresh PlayStation 5 Pro, and it’s secure to say that virtually nobody was happy by its $700 price ticket. That’s not simply all the way down to the price of residing squeezing everybody’s wallets – Mark Cerny’s presentation that apparently showcased the console’s means to render The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered so a lot better than the bottom console was principally the “They’re the identical image” meme from The Office in motion.
While there’s undoubtedly time for the PS5 Pro to show why it prices $200 greater than the common PS5, the preliminary outcomes have been fairly disappointing. Rather than get rid of the necessity to resolve between high quality and efficiency modes, builders have added much more choices to Pro-patched video games, with complicated names resembling ‘Fidelity Pro’ and ‘Versatility’. Remember while you simply plugged in a console and it labored? Halcyon days. Plus, all of the Pro’s additional energy can’t even make Bloodborne look any higher.
At least Sony followers bought a console, although. After months of rumours that Nintendo was on account of announce its successor to the Switch, the corporate introduced a model new piece of {hardware}: an alarm clock. Yes, the Alarmo is a $100 clock with game-themed alarms and a movement sensor that may detect while you’ve bought off the bed. It’s hardly the Switch 2 we have been hoping for. And even on the subject of Nintendo’s historical past of bizarre {hardware}, Alarmo is much from essentially the most fascinating or weird. A real disappointment from the home of Mario.
Unreliable Reliables
Over within the realm of tv, issues have largely been vibrant because of the likes of Arcane, Shogun, and Fallout. But 2024 additionally noticed some historically dependable reveals battle to keep up their high quality. Season 3 of The Bear actually wasn’t dangerous – it as soon as once more supplied some stable character drama and beautifully-shot kitchen nightmares. But, in comparison with the unimaginable highs of the primary two seasons, this third chapter fell considerably brief. Its frustratingly gradual tempo clashed with the lightning velocity of earlier years, and the main target being virtually totally on Carmy’s inside disaster pressured invaluable characters like Sydney into the sidelines.
Similarly, we noticed this yr’s Star Wars undertaking battle to hit the highs of The Mandalorian and Andor. The Acolyte was constructed on an interesting premise that delved into the galaxy’s previous, exploring the late High Republic period. It was filled with Jedi and featured one of many coolest lightsaber battles in your complete franchise, however even that couldn’t save the collection from its sloppy and sometimes infuriating storytelling.
The Acolyte’s saving grace might have been Manny Jacinto’s Sith lord The Stranger, who sports activities one of the crucial menacing helmets in all of Star Wars. But whereas deeper exploration of his character might have resulted in a much-improved season two, we’ll by no means get to see that because of Disney axing the present totally. This isn’t only a Disney downside – Netflix has additionally continued its behavior of cancelling reveals after barely giving them an opportunity to grasp their full potential. 2024’s Netflix cull included Kaos and Dead Boy Detectives, which be a part of final yr’s Lockwood & Co within the “cancelled after a single season” membership.
Awful Adaptations
This yr’s Fallout was a stellar train of the right way to adapt a online game for tv, with Amazon’s wasteland present being amongst our TV highlights of 2024. But it looks like Fallout’s success isn’t a assured indicator that each Amazon online game present can be incredible, as confirmed by the dreadful Like a Dragon: Yakuza present that landed on the service a number of months later. Featuring no karaoke, far too little Majima, and much an excessive amount of melodrama, Like a Dragon completely didn’t seize the stark distinction between severe and foolish that the Yakuza video games thrive on.
It wasn’t simply Japanese RPGs that have been handled poorly for TV this yr, although. Famed Japanese manga Uzumaki additionally acquired its long-awaited animated adaptation, and the outcomes couldn’t have gone any worse. The four-part Adult Swim present turned Junji Ito’s monochrome horror right into a rushed mess that sprinted to the finale, undermining plot factors, character arcs, and scares on the way in which. The greatest disappointment, although, was the extreme drop in animation high quality following a visually wealthy episode one. Uzumaki reworked from fantastically chilling right into a low-budget nightmare within the house of every week – it was a rug-pull scarier than something Junji Ito might write.
Box Office Bombs
Unfortunately, horrible variations weren’t restricted to the small display. One of the largest field workplace bombs of the yr got here within the type of Borderlands. Gearbox’s wacky looter shooter was reworked right into a hideously miscast Guardians of the Galaxy rip-off for its live-action large display journey. Many of the video games’ best-know qualities, resembling its sweary sense of humour and love of turning people into piles of goopy gore, have been toned all the way down to the purpose of vanishing fully. The end result was bland, recycled MCU-ish concepts geared towards mass marketability. In brief: a whole catastrophe. Unsurprisingly it died an unceremonious loss of life when it launched in cinemas – with Lionsgate’s CEO saying “almost the whole lot that would go mistaken did go mistaken.”
It’s debatable that an FPS like Borderlands was by no means going to outlive the transition to cinema. A sequel to essentially the most worthwhile comedian e-book film of all time and the primary R-rated movie to go a billion-dollars on the field workplace, although? Surely a second Joker was going to be a simple win. Not a lot. Joker: Folie à Deux turned out to be a miserably uninteresting follow-up, with director Todd Phillips undoing virtually all the great he established within the first movie. When not even Lady Gaga can save your kinda-sorta musical from its snoozefest courtroom drama scenes, you already know you’re in bother.
For the classic-mould film buff, although, virtually actually the largest disappointment of the yr is Megalopolis. The years-in-the-making, self-financed magnum-opus from The Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola was (maybe, if we’re sincere, considerably predictably) an indulgent disaster. Some individuals have seen methodology within the insanity (together with our personal reviewer, who gave it a 9/10) however for a lot of this opulent fable set in a futuristic, Rome-like New York City was a bloated, pretentious, uninteresting mess. Quite how the creator of the quintessential Mafia film bought right here might show to be one of many universe’s best mysteries.
From studio closures to field workplace catastrophes, 2024 has had some actual low factors. It’s onerous to discover a silver lining in a few of them, and we proceed to hope that the industries that make our favorite issues will flip a greater nook in 2025. But in different cases it’s the downs that make the ups shine brightly – and you could find lots of these vibrant stars in our roundup of the perfect reviewed video games of 2025.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Senior Features Editor.
